Body Image Conditioning

I've posted before about people asking if I'm pregnant or if hubs and I are having another child.  Today is a bit different, though, because I'm going to address where my listening to this garbage comes from, and how I pray it doesn't affect my daughter her whole life like it's affected me.  

When I was a kid, and truly up until I had our girl, I could not gain weight.  My best friends called me "Skinny", and even the much skinnier twins that I shared the backyard fence with called me "Bones"- I hated that. In high school, I was a competitive athlete so "carbo loading" before races and even on a a regular basis was normal.  When I graduated high school, I weighed 97 lbs.  In college I never weighed enough to donate blood (never over 110 lbs.).  When I met my now husband we were 34 years old and I weighed 123 lbs.  Looking back, I'm amazed at how petite I was.  My heaviest was just before I gave birth to our little sweetheart, weighing in at 165 lbs. - I totally took advantage of eating for two when I was pregnant and loved it!  Now I'm 39.5 years old and weigh 154 lbs.  If I could lose 10 pounds during Lent by giving up alcohol and refined sugar (if it's listed in the first three ingredients of a food label it's not ok), I'll feel quite accomplished.  

My metabolism has obviously changed as I've aged. I'm sure it's hormone related, but it's also lifestyle differences.  Most of my working life I've had to stand all day.  Now I have a desk job and have for the last five years. I do set up meeting rooms full of chairs and sometimes tables, but most of my job is done at my desk in my office.  There is almost always sweets in the break rooms of all of the libraries that I visit during the course of the week.  I also work outside of my home and don't necessarily have a consistent work schedule - sometimes I work until 8 at night, sometimes I work Saturdays - so saying I'll join a gym would be a waste of money.  I also would need childcare, and the gyms we can afford don't offer that.  Hubs and I like to walk and ride bikes when we can, but we're also really tired when we get home from work and by the time we get dinner on the table, eat, and get through the bedtime routine, we're ready for sleep ourselves.  

The point of all of this is, yes, I'm much heavier than I used to be.  Does my posture help?  Do I like that my chin is disappearing into my neck?  Do I enjoy people looking at my gut before they look at my face to speak to me?  Do I find it endearing that so many people have asked me if I'm pregnant or when I'm due?  Do you think I like that my belly pushes the waist of my underwear and pants down? The answer to all of these is a big fat, "NO!".  

But we don't talk about weight in front of our daughter because the last thing I want for her is to have a complex.  She already asks me why I'm full all of the time.  She is built just like her dad and I were when we were younger.  Sooner than later, some classmate will make some comment about her body and the cycle will start in her brain just like it did in mine.  She'll be too thin, or too something or not enough something else.  

The saddest part is, it's the minority of people who make these asinine comments. The majority of people are really nice and even give compliments, but our brains are wired to retain the negative instead.  We are conditioned by our environment to believe awful things about ourselves.  I'd like to offer some Pavlovian reasoning here, but all I can say is that if we would all make the conscious effort to think before we speak (yes, I'm super guilty of violating this in other instances, but have gotten much better with age) and be more sensitive to how others may perceive our words, we'd stop feeding people's complexes....or giving them one in the first place.